


Die Musik Kommt

by romangold



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Awkward Flirting, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-26
Updated: 2015-12-26
Packaged: 2018-05-09 10:17:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5536172
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/romangold/pseuds/romangold
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Maybe everyone’s drowning in the day, the night, memories and regrets and guilts, in relief, in pure, unadulterated happiness. Maybe they’re all dying.</i>
</p><p>Hermann finds Newt after the apocalypse is cancelled, and the two realize that perhaps they aren't so toxic together after all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Die Musik Kommt

There’s an itch, under his skin. It’s wrong where he is.

Newt is alone. He sits in the K-Science lab, listening to the roar of the celebration outside the doors. He’s drunk, of course, but not falling-over-himself-drunk. His vision is a bit fuzzy around the edges, and he’s having a hard time keeping his head balanced.

Nevertheless, his eyes are transfixed on the chunk of kaiju splayed across the table.

They’re gone. They’re _gone_.

Part of Newt feels relieved. Part of him feels empty. There’s something missing that can never be replaced, or filled in. Some chunk of his brain’s spiraled into the ocean, weighed down by the loss of such intense feeling.

That’s it.

Newt feels numb.

He’s underwater. He’s sluggish and cold and _numb._ (That’s the word. It is. He is.) He’s being dragged down by a ball and chain and he’s floundering. He can’t quite feel his fingers and toes, and his mind is slowly turning to static. And it’s not the booze- at least, not all of it. The gloom of the Sibelius concerto that’s been playing threatens to end. It isn’t rock, or punk, but it’s beautiful. Doomed, gray, crashing: An ocean within an orchestra, within notes and yellow papers of key signatures and cadenzas.

Newt is snapped out of the reverie by a sudden change in atmosphere. The concerto is gone, done, taking the image of the ocean with it. It’s Rossini’s _The Barber of Seville._

Opera. With the word comes a flood of flashing blue images: Garish costumes and a woman’s strong, stereotypical singing voice; a man and woman, shouting violently; a dangling pair of boots; Newt’s uncle speaking in his soft accent about frogs and evolution and Wagner-

Before Rosina’s voice can finish its crescendo through the lab in shrill Italian, Newt’s scooped up a paperweight and chucked the thing at the stereo.

There’s several loud crashes and the thunk of the paperweight falling away from the ruined piece of tech. Then it’s silent.

“You know, you don’t seem very pleased, given that the world was just saved.”

Newt turns around, tense; his tattoos stand out against his muscles. Hermann is standing just behind the line that divides their respective sides of the lab. “Given your excessively extroverted personality,” the mathematician continued,“I assumed I would find you out celebrating.”

“I thought you’d be in here, with your nose stuck in a book, instead of getting drunk with strangers,” Newt returns. It’s harsh, for some reason. He’s upset, angry. Like he’s been cheated.

There’s a slight buzz in the air that wasn’t present just a few moments ago, and it’s not from the outburst. Newt wonders if it’s from the sensory overload that he had just experienced or if it’s just the booze.

Newt wonders if it’s the Drift. He wonders if Hermann can feel it, too.

Hermann, thankfully, isn’t bothered by the tone. Or, at least, he doesn’t let it show in the lines set around his mouth and crow’s feet carved in his eyelids. He’s older than he was a few hours ago, much older, though it doesn’t show much, either.

“There’s only so drunk one can get when they still have an obnoxious biologist’s memories spiking in their head,” he returns, feet shifting nervously with the help of his cane. “I didn’t know you thought about music so constantly, Newton. I can’t seem to get _The Magic Flute_ out of my head.”

Newt can’t stop himself. “Shut up,” he snaps, unsure of how he’s been offended. He decides that he has been, anyway. The buzzing is taking over the air and sucking it up, or it’s in his head, but either way, it’s consumed too much space and it’s too much, too much, not enough. Not enough. Nothing is balanced, is the problem.

They stand there. They stand. Apart, divided by tempers and buzzings of the brain and a silly yellow line taped to the floor. They stand still and dance around the focal point of the raised tensions. As blunt as Newt is, he won’t admit a thing.

Hermann. His style is to become indignant and flustered and stomp away shouting insults over his shoulder. At the moment, however, he’s quiet. Very. Very quiet. Calm. His eyes are without trouble, as if the Drift has gifted him with the unnatural understanding of each galaxy and soul. “Newton,” he says, voice quiet. Quiet and even.

Newt doesn’t respond, just stands and breathes. His fists clench and unclench. Hermann says his name again, and this time Newt squeezes his eyes shut. He doesn’t know. He can’t. 

“Newton, are you upset that the kaiju are gone?”

Newt opens his eyes and screams,“No!”

Too quickly. At the top of his lungs. He knows. Hermann knows, too, and he knows. They know. The biologist’s eyes are filled with despair. Because what will they _think_ -

“Newton,” comes the breathy response from the other side of the tape. “I can’t begin to imagine what the inside of your mind must feel like. To be stuck with it, with the emotions forced upon you.” Newt wants to tell him to shut up again, to not get all stupid and romantic, but he has a sudden painful image of a nearly unfamiliar gangly eleven-year-old writing poetry instead of doing his math homework, and is silenced.

“Connecting yourself to a monster…to a kaiju.” The taller man shakes his head. “Sometimes I’m not sure if you lack a brain, or if you possess one that is so logical that it constantly casts away all common human sense in order to come to a solution.” He looks like he wants to move or sit, but instead he continues to speak.

“To have one of those things inside your head- twice- is more than I can fathom. I…think it was very idiotic of you to do so.”

“What’s your point?” Newt interrupts, wanting Hermann to leave so the word can be spread that the biologist misses the kaiju, he feels numb without them and needs to be cast into a ditch and-

“I also think,” the taller man goes on as if no one else had ever spoke,“that it was very…brave of you, even if you weren’t aware of how important it was, what you were doing at the time. Having the idea in the first place, and knowing it was what you had to do…”

He sighs. And steps over the line. Closer. They’re a foot apart, now. The buzzing around Newt’s head becomes sharper, like a swarm of bees.

“Newton, I…just wanted to let you know that you’re not alone,” Hermann murmurs. “I know what’s happened to you, and…I will listen. To whatever you need to say.”

He purses his lips, unsure of how to go on.

Newt will do anything to make it all stop. “They left. They just up and left,” he whispers. He whispers because maybe Hermann can’t hear him over the bees, the noise, the mess in the air. “They’re gone and- and I didn’t think- I didn’t think- I- I didn’t-”

Then Hermann moves towards him, eyes despairing, and Newt’s vision flashes blue and then his mother is shrieking out high notes to a sold-out house, and the image fades back to the mathematician but the sound is still there, Wagner, no, Mozart, no, Purcell; the buzzing persists, equal to the sound of the desperate aria.

When Hermann is two steps from him, the intensity of the piercing drone is briefly too much, and Newt’s vision goes white.

Feeling. There. Brushing against his chin. Two hands cup either side of his face, and a forehead rests against his own.

And everything stops.

Newt opens his eyes to silence.

Hermann stands there, leaning over enough so that he and Newt are touching. Foreheads. Long hands on still cheeks. Breathing. Newt breathes out. The sounds have stopped. No opera, no blue in his vision, no insistent humming drilling a hole in Newt’s skull.

“You heard it, too,” Newt whispers. He means the noise that wasn’t really there. Hermann blinks. His next breath out is more shaky than the previous ones.

“Yes.”

“Did you feel it, as well?” the biologist breathes. Hermann’s hands are gentle but his eyes are shut tight as if holding back tears. “You mean,” the taller man responds,“the emptiness? The space in your head that they invaded and filled up and abandoned without thinking to put back together?”

Newt’s breathing hitches. In a flash, he reaches out and heaves Hermann into a solid hug, arms wrapping around his waist and wet eyes pushing into his neck. He gives a start when Hermann returns the hug with no hesitation, but continues planning to never let go.

The memories flow freely between them. It’s the Drift, sort of, just not on speed. Newt breathes. He can feel Hermann do the same as they melt into one, one mind, one sky, one sun. One kaiju. One human.

Newt sees letters. His own slanted scrawl, words erased so brutally in excitement that the paper creases in. Then an ink pen and less-than-perfect cursive, a few stray black dots here and there, an antiquated vocabulary. Promises. _Where? I can’t wait. When? I thoroughly look forward to it._

A little boy with unfortunate bangs and tears in his eyes. Locked in a closet. A different boy with a loud mouth and a bloody nose; a group of bigger boys kicking him in the snow.

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” Newt whispers, arms beginning to tremble. “We saved the day. The heroes always walk away fine at the end.” His fists grip handfuls of Hermann’s coat. “How do they ignore all of the destruction surrounding them?”

Hermann hesitates before letting out a long breath. He pulls away from the long hug to purse his lips and meet Newt’s eyes. “One step at a time, I suppose.”

Newt closes his eyes and sees the careful hands of a pre-teen cradling an infant sibling, finding a small contentedness without his parents to take her away and subsequently neglect her, to never hold her. And then his own small fingers plucking out a concerto on a German harpsichord, a troubled 7-year-old shouting at his musical instructor.

Newt feels a twinge in his leg and says,“Let’s get out of here, huh?”

Then his hearing explodes; they’re out of the lab now, surrounded by bright lights and cheers. Some people seem to be hugging as if they’re connected, glued, skin sewn together in desperation at the need for human contact. People are sweating, crying; Newt’s surprised they aren’t all drowning.

Or maybe they are. Maybe everyone’s drowning in the day, the night, memories and regrets and guilts, in relief, in pure, unadulterated happiness. Maybe they’re all dying.

The hurt in his leg is back for a split second, and Newt takes ahold of Hermann’s shoulder. He finds peace in the contact. He leads them through the crowd of the dying.

Newt’s door is locked. His key is forgotten somewhere obscure, or somewhere simple, but it hurts his head to think about. He’s so exhausted that he leans against the wall next to his door and slumps down into a seated position on the floor.

After one breathe, two breaths, three breaths, Hermann’s arm is flush against his own. They both sit, in the hallway, minds at rest but thoughts still moving, flowing like a turquoise river. An undersized twelve-year-old saving a cat from being the target of stone-throwing, there’s a crack in his glasses from playing hero but he gets a new pair and a new pet for his efforts; a pencil breaks between long fingers after hours of doing math equations, hours and hours, the only thing that brings him happiness is math as he listens to choir music and his father shouting from outside his door.

“Who would’ve thought?” Newt smirks. “We’re Drift compatible- the two most obnoxious dorks on the planet.”

“When you say it like that,” Hermann replies,“it makes quite a lot of sense.” Then frowns. “I am hardly a _dork_ , though.”

A scoff. “Dude. You’re the dorkiest.”

A 6-year-old’s memory of an opera singer- Mutti, his father says to call her- and she is strong and beautiful and her voice carries like nothing else, but she looks at the little boy as if he’s some sewer rat and says “I don’t want him,” and like that, his heart is broken and there’s tears smudging his glasses; a knobby-kneed 19-year-old tries to hug his mother when he makes the mistake of going home for Christmas, and she shuts her eyes and turns a cold shoulder like there is something wrong with him.

“Do you think part of us will…be like this?” Hermann whispers. “Forever? Empty, I mean.” They both are gazing ahead at the blank wall in front of them. “Do you think anything will fill what they took away?”

There’s a long pause as Newton considers his next move. He feels Hermann’s heartbeat thumping along a relaxed rhythm in his head, sees a serious young boy smiling at a worn-down piece of chalk, and then suddenly realizes that his own hand is covering the mathematician’s.

Hermann’s hand is warm. It stiffens. Then relaxes.

“I think maybe we’ll be like this for a while,” Newt answers. “For the rest of our lives, statistically speaking, is the most accurate bet I’d make.”

“Well that’s not very reassuring,” the taller man huffs, voice quiet next to the sound of the drowning people in the other room.

Newt smiles. “I also think that we can never go wrong with a bit of human interaction. Maybe…if we…if we stick together…”

Newt falls asleep in his chair and Hermann reclines it for him, places his scalpel in a safe place; Newt’s heavy metal is playing too loudly and Hermann complains but taps his fingers to the beat.

The taller man seems to grow warmer somehow, and then their legs are touching as well and there’s no more itch, just the feeling of something beginning to be filled, percent by percent. “I believe, perhaps, that our differences and our similarities are not too outmatched as we have been made to believe. Perhaps…”

His leg is killing him, it’s _killing_ him, killing, and Newt finds a broken charger for the man’s electric blanket, and suddenly it appears in the lab as if had never been gone; Hermann’s been writing down equations all day and he so close and when he finally descends the ladder there’s a full tray of food there and Newt’s back is turned, and he’s smiling gently, gently.

“I think, if we stick together, we’ll be just fine.”

They sit there in the hallway, surrounded by walls and ocean and humans, human beings. Newt’s on land, finally, after too long, too long, beginning to thaw, some feeling returning to his fingers. And perhaps Hermann is, too. And maybe there’s hope for them yet.

And the drowning people rejoice, and the two men smile, and the Drift gradually becomes just that much more bearable, just that much more beautiful.

And they thaw together, warm together, secretly hoping to never have to move from their seat in the hallway.


End file.
